Saturday, June 2, 2007

Glenn Reynolds links to this post on the much-discussed colony collapse disorder, which involves the sudden dissapearance of entire colonies of bees. The Straight Dope says the disorder has been known for a century, but it occurred to me that knowledge might go back a lot further.

Vergil, in the 1st Century BC, wrote a long poem about farming, and its fourth book is devoted to beekeeping. A couple of passages seem tantalizing:

But when the bees fly aimlessly and play listlessly in the sky,And they abandon their hives and leave their homes cold,You should keep their changeable minds from this empty game.Nor is it hard to stop them: rip the wings off the kings*.(*Vergil, along with the rest of the Romans, thought that the queen bees were male.)